In Bells of Shangri-la: Scholars, Spies, Invaders in Tibet (originally published in 1919), the author, an academic in West Bengal Education Service who attends a course in the Institute of Advanced Studies in Simla, reminisces on a bookstore there. Books are not only a priceless resource for him, he says, but when he was a child, he imagined books creating new stories as they lay on the shelves. The inanimate books thus acquired a life of their own. Every time he returned to them however, the stories took their place again like ‘errant schoolchildren’. As an adult, they bear testimony to how one graduates smoothly and effortlessly from the oral tales of childhood to the world of letters. Such thoughts now come to him between sleep and waking, in an amorphously dreamlike shape.
Although books per se are not exactly catalysts for the kind of escapades and encounters he writes about, inimitable descriptions like these aroused my curiosity and stimulated my fascination for out of the way experiences in unfamiliar, inaccessible places as I embarked on the adventure of reading and reviewing these two exceptional travel narratives, though it is reductive to label them as ‘travel narratives’.